One of the main targets of this project is to create free, online access to historical sources, open to researchers from various disciplines all over the world. Unlike earlier printed editions of correspondences, this source is not static but of a highly dynamic nature, making it possible for the scholarly community to discuss problems, share information and add transcriptions or footnotes. One of the great advantages of this project is its ability to invoke new questions, new interpretations and new information, and to bring all this together on an expanding website.

The project has brought together a number of correspondences of well-known scholars in a virtual research environment (VRE) called the ePistolarium, which allows researchers to explore and analyze the corpus in innovative ways. Apart from a full text search the ePistolarium allows selection of letters by metadata and persons mentioned in the letter texts. The ePistolarium contains straightforward visualizations and also exposes the results of co-citation analysis, keywords analysis and topic modeling.